Why Use Pay Per Click?

The top three reasons to use Pay Per Click advertising for your business.

Drives Traffic and leads to Your Website

Generates Phone Calls for Your Business

Better Value Than Traditional Advertising

Pay Per Click Drives Traffic to Your Website

Pay Per Click Advertising is a great way to drive traffic to your website. Large companies understand this. Some of America’s largest retailers have reportedly spend $50 million per year on Google AdWords alone. Most companies don’t have those kinds of resources, but that doesn’t mean you have to miss out on traffic and the customers it brings with it.

Direct Traffic/Other – People typing in your site or traffic with missing referral data

Referral Traffic

Social Traffic

Our average Pay Per Click Management client receives about 25% of all website traffic through advertising on Google and Bing. Generally, the percentage decreases some for clients who are also actively pursuing SEO strategies for their sites. The percentage increases significantly for websites that have existed only a short time (because they are not getting much in terms of organic traffic). If you are not using pay-per-click advertising for your site, you are missing out on significant traffic gains you wouldn’t get otherwise.

PPC is Great for Young Companies

Pay Per Click can make a big difference for startups and companies that don’t rank well in the search results. It is also great for companies that are trying to grow quickly. A 2014 study of Inc Magazines 5,000 fastest growing companies revealed that they spent an average of over $20,000 per year on pay per click because it helped drive traffic and customers. You don’t have to spend that much. Average local businesses can spend $200/month to $1,000/month and still do very well with lead generation.

Pay-Per-Click Reaches More Customers, Even If Your SEO is Great

According to Google studies, 89% of AdWords traffic is in addition to what you would get if you relied on your organic listing alone. That means that very few of the people clicking on your ad would have clicked on your website listing in the organic search rankings even if your ad wasn’t there. Why is this true? Studies of the way people look at browser show that they spend more time looking at the top left side of the page. Google AdWords positions its ads at the top of the page taking up 80% or more of the search results page before scrolling and those ads get the most attention from people viewing the screen. A few years back, a study showed that 65% clicks went to ads when people used keywords showing they were looking to purchase a product or service. That means customers are more likely to click on your ad than your organic listing.

Pay Per Click Can Make Your Phone Ring

According to the media and advertising consulting firm BIA/Kelsey, phone calls edge out website forms as providing the best quality leads. Their survey of business owners show website leads provide many good quality leads, but phone calls provide more excellent quality leads. While pay per click is known for driving website traffic, it is also a great tool for driving phone calls. That is especially true now that mobile searches play such an important role in driving leads. For businesses where there is a sense of urgency from the consumer, phone calls are often better than website leads (which take longer to respond to). When you need a tow truck or your air conditioner is broken, you are more likely to call to get help faster. Using Call Only campaigns, optimizing all campaigns with phone call extensions and other tactics, pay per click can be turned into a phone call generation tool, rather than a web visit generation tool.

Pay Per Click is a Better Value than Traditional Advertising

The old model in advertising was based on how many people could potentially see your advertisement. When buying advertising space in a newspaper, you would talk with the sales representative about circulation and cost per thousand impressions (CPM). There was no focus on results and very little opportunity to target just those people interested in your products or services. Pay per click has changed all of that.

Super Targeted

In traditional print, radio or television advertising, you could do a little targeting using demographics. You could select the sports section of the newspaper or choose the country music station at a certain time of day, but you could never choose only to advertise to people who were showing an interest in your product or service. That could only happen in the phone book…which made it a successful option for many years. Search Engine Marketing takes the best of the phone book targeting and makes it even better. With pay per click, you can target by country, state, city, zip code, or even a radius around your business. On top of location, you can target by time of day, day of the week and more. So if you own a restaurant and want to showcase your lunch specials from 10am until 1pm, Monday through Friday, to people looking up restaurants, you can do that.

Being able to be super targeted increases the chance that you are hitting the right person with the right message at the right time. It means there is much less waste. So by not paying for advertising that is reaching the wrong audience, you save a lot of money.

More Trackable

One of the challenges of traditional advertising has always been that it has been hard to track where your results are coming from. Pay per click and other digital advertising haven’t completely solved that problem, but they have made it a lot easier. For example, we can track many details about website visits generated by AdWords campaigns, including who has filled out a form. Add in some call tracking and it is possible to gather some basic data on how many phone call leads are coming in because of seeing your ads, even if they don’t end up clicking on them. Better data gives you more decision making power when it comes to deciding whether to invest more or less in a particular type of advertising.

Flexible

Using pay per click or other digital advertising is usually a lot more flexible than traditional advertising methods. If you put an ad in the phone book, you are committing to a year of advertising at a set monthly rate. With pay per click, you can set monthly budgets, but unless you sign a contract stating otherwise, you don’t have to stick to the same budget or even advertise all the time. If you have a seasonal business and want to increase advertising at certain times of the year, it is usually possible to drive more leads pretty quickly. If your staff is overwhelmed and you need a little time to hire and expand, you can temporarily reduce your advertising spend. And if something isn’t working, you can always give up on it and try something else because once the clicks stop, you stop paying.